The military meanwhile vowed to finish off the separatist Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), whose rebels killed five soldiers and a policeman in the southeast on Wednesday, after a week of urban violence in the region.

"Our security forces have displayed an attitude of tolerance unseen in other countries, at the risk of being wounded or killed," Erdogan told reporters.

"No one can level such accusations against them and we will not bother to answer them each and every time."

He was commenting on reports that a group of European Parliament members, in a letter to Erdogan, condemned the authorities' response to the unrest and threatened that Ankara's membership talks with the European Union might be suspended if it fails to guarantee the rights of its Kurdish minority.

"Most recently, five soldiers and a policeman were killed. Those who write such letters should first come and experience what they (the security forces) have been going through," Erdogan said.

The six were killed in attacks by the PKK, considered as a terrorist group by Ankara, the EU and the United States, which has been accused of orchestrating the riots.

The violence, which broke out on March 28 in Diyarbakir, the central city of the southeast, saw hundreds of Kurdish youths torch banks and public buildings, vandalize shops and attack the police with firebombs.

Twelve people were killed in the region as the security forces opened fire to disperse the crowds, while three women were killed in Istanbul when rioters set ablaze a city bus with a Molotov cocktail.

Another person was killed in a bomb attack on a bus station in Istanbul, claimed by a radical Kurdish group, which also took the blame for Wednesday's bombing of an office of Erdogan's party in the city.

The funerals of the six slain members of the security forces in western Turkey attracted hundreds of people chanting anti-PKK slogans and brandishing Turkish flags.

Top military officials, including land forces commander Yasar Buyukanit, and scores of soldiers took part in the ceremonies, carrying the coffins, wrapped in Turkish flags, on their shoulders.

Buyukanit vowed the army would continue to fight the PKK until it finishes off the group, which has been waging an armed campaign for Kurdish self-rule in the southeast since 1984. The conflict has claimed some 37,000 lives.

"We will continue our struggle with determination... We will end this suffering," Anatolia news agency quoted the general as saying at one of the funerals, in a village near Ankara.

"Those traitors will be given the necessary punishment," he said.

Several mourners called for the execution of PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan, who has been serving a life sentence on the prison island of Imrali since 1999.

"Don't feed him at Imrali, hang him!" they shouted.

Television footage showed scores of people carrying a giant Turkish flag at another funeral, in the southern city of Mersin, chanting "The motherland cannot be divided."